


songs from before

by riverbed



Category: American Revolution RPF, Hamilton - Miranda
Genre: F/M, Fluff, Hurt/Comfort
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-21
Updated: 2016-01-21
Packaged: 2018-05-15 07:29:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,827
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5776900
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/riverbed/pseuds/riverbed
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Eliza has come up against more walls than she can count, and she has torn them down each time.</p>
            </blockquote>





	songs from before

**Author's Note:**

> i wrote this in about two hours, just because it felt like it needed to be written. i love Eliza a lot, and have feelings that I can't exactly articulate because it is past my bedtime.
> 
> with the extra-special bonus motif of the sequence number nine, since i know we all love that shit! at least it's not seven! tell yourself at least it isn't seven!

_un_

The first night she sees him, he looks at her like he is seeing stars for the first time, like he is dazzled. No man has noticed her like that before. Even standing with her undeniably more charismatic sister, he is clearly taken by _Eliza_ \- even from across the room, the way he looks past Angelica, mid-laugh, leaves nothing in doubt.

As he courts her, laying charm on thick around her father and sisters, she finds herself enamored by his unflinching passions, his dark humor, his inability to be anything less than genuine. He is shameless, confessing things that make her feel closer to him than she has ever felt to another person. They shake her, make her rethink her station in life. She remembers Angelica telling her a few years back of the romance of new ideas. She supposes that now she sees the appeal - it’s exciting to see the gears turn in Alexander’s head. In his letters he lays out his thought processes, logically assuming conclusions about the war and the evil of England’s patriarchy and her beauty and working backwards from there, dressing misshapen mannequins of problems in arguments so convincing they couldn’t be torn into if she’d wanted to try.

Before Alexander, all around her were limitations. Now, suddenly, there is endless possibility, and she is powerless against the sheer force of it rushing toward her.

*

_deux_

He marries her just before Christmas. He holds her hand tight in his as the rector pronounces them man and wife, and before he kisses her he whispers promises of things that make her heart beat so fast she has a moment of real worry that it has sprouted wings and is plotting to flutter away.

Wide-eyed and open, gracious and sweet, he is as attentive to her as he is to each thing he endeavors. Her husband is impressive in his voracious need to learn. She allows herself the indulgent thought that perhaps together, they will never stop learning.

*  
  
_trois_  
  
The birth of their first child is miraculous. Her mother always said a baby was a miracle, but Eliza had never fully grasped it. Her mother had also sworn to the girls that their father had cried when he first saw each of them - a very specific sort of crying, that ugly, silent sort of weeping that knocks the wind out of you.  
None of them had believed her, brushing it off as the sort of sentimental drivel that children always thought their parents spewed. They saw their father, a hardened yet kind soldier, a mountain of a man, and thought, _Surely this man would never be so weak as to cry._

She suddenly remembers that story when Alexander takes Philip into his arms and his breath catches, audibly, in his throat. She finds herself unprepared for the wet in his eyes when he stares at their son, and then at her, then back at Philip again, runs his thumb over his little cheek as if he cannot convince himself of his existence, and yet it all seems familiar, somehow - her mind seems suddenly willing to paint pictures of her own strong, stoic father, moved to tears by the arrival of each of his children.

Even more miraculously, she had never realized that sensitivity could be strength.

And she had never wished for Alexander to be tamed, but she now finds that she rather likes the gentling.

*  
  
_quatre_  
  
Yorktown is taken back, and then the war ends, and then Alexander is home almost all the time, though he shuts himself away in his study and for all she and the children see him he may as well be off fighting elsewhere.

Eliza knows that he is doing what he does best, sacrificing what he loves for something he thinks he might love more. Family for country - she is used to being put on the back burner. But she wants him in their children’s lives.

He comes to bed late and does not tell her war stories - he tells her of the present, and that, she appreciates. He goes on and on about the President, his high expectations of him in the face of such adversities, of Jefferson and Madison and John Adams and how it almost feels like another war, some days, belligerents poised delicately and spies in their midst - that snake Aaron Burr, he growls, after Burr takes her father’s seat in the Senate.

It almost feels like another war, some days. She cares for their children, mostly alone, but is astounded by their empathy - as Philip in particular grows older, he becomes absolutely astute at picking up on her sadness, and one day when he is ten he climbs into his mother’s lap and as she strokes his hair, he says quietly: “Daddy doesn’t make you laugh so much anymore.”

It is an innocent observation. Eliza waits until Philip is called upstairs by his tutor to sob quietly into her hands, then she goes and finds Alexander, who is as good as he always is with charming his way past her petty problems, so much less important than the good of a nation.

She wishes he could see what he has hanging in the most precarious of balances.

*  
  
_cinq_  
  
The thought of Alexander with someone else makes her blood scald, makes her go dizzy with rage. She has been so forgiving, and she tells him so. She is not kind about it - she has done everything he has ever asked, has stood by his side through so much, has let him woo her and impress her and sweep her heels over head and he has repaid her by breaking the most fundamental trust they ever shared.

The worst part is that she knows she will forgive him when he noses against her neck, a little nudge he used that evening they first met.

He is smug, and stubborn, and passionate, and unbridled, and a walking contradiction. Well, her mother had said, she had never wanted things uncomplicated.

*  
  
_six_  
  
He takes the Reynolds affair (she hates that it has a name - hates that it is a public tragedy instead of their family’s private struggle) as an opportunity to come clean about encounters with fellow soldiers, men he has brought to their home, and, most painfully, about his torch for Angelica, somewhat extinguished but never entirely.

Eliza holds the bitter taste of his betrayal on her tongue and finally swallows it, telling herself she does not deserve to be so angry because she knew - or should have known, the way he looked at everyone like they were another brilliant star. Alexander may see a clear night sky wherever he looks but at least she can be a constellation, a white-hot bundle of fury and pattern, burning bright when all the rest go dark.

She can be his guiding star, his way home. There is strength in that, and dignity, more than in giving up.

*

_sept_

He wraps her hair around his hand and kisses down her throat, baring his teeth when he moves to lift her up and hoist her chemise from her hips. She draws in a deep, shuddery breath as he puts his mouth on her, his expert tongue working debauched epithets against her, love poems in a braille only she can read.

She examines closely the scars on his back in the dim light as he reads in the evenings, knife gashes and bullet wounds, though he still has not told her a single war story. At times she crawls over him, placing his glasses on the bedside table, taking his hands in hers and moving them to her hips, asking him to feel her, and he does.

But he wants more deeply to understand, and sometimes understanding is not what she can give him.

As she observes his mood swings and ravenousness for more, she feels she is falling behind, feels the cold realization come on that nobody could ever keep up with him.

He had made her believe she could, and that feels like more of a betrayal than anything she has felt before.

*

_huit_

Philip dies and ironically, things become simpler. Alexander is suddenly softened into the man she remembers seeing on the day of their Philip’s birth, time a cruel litany. He suggests they move, letting politics go, all of a sudden eager to open a practice upstate. Letters from people they had never even considered friends pour in, political enemies and allies alike, the deepest sympathies of an entire state here and an entire country there (Lafayette, writing on behalf of the French.) Eliza is overwhelmed and almost retreats completely into herself.

But Alexander will not let her. He takes her hand and makes her feel like the naive young girl who has just met him again, twirled around a ballroom of passing vignettes in a whirlwind romance. In sweet, fractured moments, she forgets that she is even in pain, and the regret is so shocking when she remembers that she has to pull away, but Alexander holds her close and lets her sob through it against his chest.

He promises her that he will be there, and for once, he is not promising the world. She decides that that is enough, his long-delayed honesty with himself.

*

_neuf_

Eliza likes to think she kept up just fine.

Alexander had once told her about the eye of a storm, the clarity to be sought in chaos. When he dies, every fog, every pretense is lifted so swiftly from her vision that the resulting view is almost violent, but then she sees that the storm is all around her, surrounding but abiding her.

She forgives Burr immediately, though she knows he does not forgive himself. Her other children ask questions that she provides graceful answers to, when she can. Her sisters are foundational; she finds herself returning to Angelica’s arms like she did as a girl, seeking answers to her own questions when they arise. Angelica is bluntly honest, doing Eliza the courtesy of letting the whole truth be known, all of its awful elegance. Alexander’s life is an epic, something absolutely swashbuckling, and he has written it all down, every gory, too-honest detail.

She sifts through it all, painstakingly, poring over note after letter after speech after pamphlet after appeal. She and Angelica - and even Peggy, when she can - sit for hours, remarking on interesting highlights of his innermost thoughts. Peggy, at one point, questions whether they should be reading his diaries, and Eliza stops reading for a moment to consider it.

Angelica answers for her. “The man never wanted secrets, anyway.”

Eliza smiles to herself, reaches for the next piece of paper in the current pile. Today she is reading their letters to each other, and finds an early one from herself to him, dated for 1780 and noting wryly that her sisters would be scandalized if they knew of their correspondence.

Little had she known.

**Author's Note:**

> the title of this story is a max richter album, but i actually listened to more of its chronological predecessor while i wrote this. [this song in particular](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8rluU6BGpKw) is a good accompaniment.


End file.
